1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to integrated circuits, and more particularly to low leakage and data retention circuitry.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Most integrated circuits have a design goal to reduce the overall power consumption. The total power consumed by an integrated circuit includes dynamic power consumption and standby leakage current consumption. The challenge in designing an integrated circuit is to reduce the dynamic power and leakage power, while maintaining performance and cost goals for the integrated circuit.
In complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS), various types of leakage occur such as pn junction reverse-bias current, subthreshold leakage, oxide tunneling current, gate current due to hot-carrier injection, gate-induced drain leakage, and channel punchthrough current. When the threshold voltage for a CMOS transistor is reduced for higher performance, the leakage power is significant in the total power consumption of the CMOS circuit.
There are two approaches in reducing the leakage power for CMOS circuits. The first approach is a process level technique that controls the doping profile of the transistor. The other approach is a circuit level technique where voltages at the different device terminals such as the drain, source, gate, and body are controlled. Some circuit level techniques are discussed below.
One circuit level technique is stacking transistors, which is also called self-reverse bias. When more than one transistor in a stack of series-connected transistors is turned off, the subthreshold leakage current is reduced. One problem with the transistor stack is that only a three times reduction in leakage current is achieved.
Another circuit level technique is a multiple threshold voltage design. Both high- and low-threshold transistors are on the same chip to deal with the leakage problem. The high-threshold transistors suppress the sub-threshold leakage current. The low-threshold transistors are used to achieve higher performance. One problem with a multiple threshold design is that process complexity and costs are increased.
Another circuit level technique is a multiple body bias in which the body voltage is changed to modify the threshold voltage. If separate body biases are applied to different NMOS transistors, the transistor cannot share the same well, which requires triple well technologies. One problem is that well biasing consumes a lot of chip area and requires extra power supplies for each cell. This technique also increases process complexity and the leakage reduction is not optimal.
Another technique for reducing leakage is a sleep transistor. FIG. 1 depicts prior art circuitry including a sleep transistor. For NMOS sleep transistors, one or more NMOS transistors are added to logic gates in series with the cell transistors to VSS. The NMOS sleep transistors act as a switch to turn on and off the logic gate. In FIG. 1, the sleep transistor 130 is turned on (gate to VDD) during normal cell operation. When the cell is idle, the sleep transistor 130 is turned off (gate tied to VSS) to reduce the leakage current of the cell. Sleep transistors can also be PMOS transistors. One problem with sleep transistors is that if all logic has sleep transistors, the logic will lose their state information.